Sam Gutierrez was allowed in, although by rights he should not have been, because he had befriended the major in charge of the installation, had cut through all the red tape that wound inexorably around the officer when he had tried to marry a Thai girl. Such things might be okay for the enlisted men, the higher brass thought, but not for an officer. Especially not for one whose security clearance had the code word Cosmic.
Major Bates met him outside the MARS station. “Don’t suppose I can ask what this call is all about?” he said.
“Don’t suppose you can, Sean,” Sam replied. “But you know I wouldn’t do it unless I had to.”
Sean Bates nodded. He trusted the colonel more than he would his own brother. Of course, his brother was a goddamn war-resister hippie, so that might have had something to do with it.
“All warmed up,” he said, leading Sam inside the Quonset hut. “You know the drill.” He unlocked a door, ushered Sam inside, left, locking the door behind him.
On the table was an ordinary-looking telephone. But none of Ma Bell’s phones had this capability. His voice would be routed to a transmitter that bounced signals off the troposphere, to be picked up by a receiver somewhere in the hills to the west of Washington, D.C., there to be shunted into the national telephone grid. Anyone intercepting the signals would get only a garbled jumble of syllables, the scrambling of which was done by a mainframe computer at the transmitting end and the unscrambling done by a similar unit in Virginia. Only when the words went into the phone lines would the text be clear.
And if someone intercepted that?
They might, Sam thought. And if they do, and the old man finds out about it, there’ll be more hell to pay than there would be for somebody simply going through back channels to get something done.
He picked up the phone, listened for a second, realized he was already connected.
“Senator?” he said.
The familiar voice, indelibly marked with the inflections of his native West Texas, came into the receiver. “Sam?” it said. “What kind of shit you got yourself into now?”
Senator Clyde Macallan had been a politician all his adult life, or at least all of it after a short stint in the Army during the Korean War. The Distinguished Service Cross he’d earned there had been a sure-fire credential for a young man running for office in patriotic West Texas. Elected to the House, where he’d served for twelve years, then to the Senate, Clyde Macallan had never aspired to the public leadership roles. There was no doubt that, had he chosen, he could have been Speaker of the House. His name was still being bandied as a candidate for Senate majority leader, though when interviewed the senator expressed his opinion that the position was worth about as much, as another old Texan had once said about the vice presidency, as a pitcher of warm spit.
Macallan had confided to Sam Gutierrez one night, after perhaps a few too many bourbon-and-branch, his secret to success.
“You get out front, you’re a target,” he said. “Done that. Won me a medal once, and more holes in my young body than I care to count. No more. Everybody’s gunnin’ for you. Reporters, they may love you for a while, but sooner or later it’s just like their last girlfriend. That pussy they thought was sweeter than honey, suddenly it don’t smell so sweet anymore. So they find more and more things wrong, and next thing you know, they can’t figure out what it was they saw in her in the first place.
“Me, I like to let other people, the ones that like to see their pictures in Life magazine, get out there. Get to meet the ambassadors, go to all the big parties, have the corporations falling all over themselves to get them the right seats at whatever it is they want to go to.
“And when they get up there, they remember the ol’ boy who helped ’em. Knew the right people, got this or that pet bill through. Could call up the chief of police in Podunk, Arkansas, and get that DUI ticket suppressed. Made sure the picture that some smart reporter took down at the Tidal Pool, two o’clock in the morning and the aide was doing something best described by a French word, never got in the paper. Then when I need something done, it gets done. My constituents need a new bridge, we get a highway bill passed. Army needs a new piece of equipment, we find the money somewhere in the budget. Everybody’s happy. That’s the best way to be, happy, ain’t it?”
He’d known the Gutierrez family ever since he could remember. Everyone in Winkle, Texas, did. The Gutierrezes were the biggest landowners in that part of West Texas. Their holdings dated back to the sixteenth century, land grants from a grateful king to one of his favorite soldiers.
The martial tradition had continued. The Gutierrez family had fought Comanche raiders, had sent volunteer companies against the Navajo uprising in Santa Fe, had furnished soldiers for a dozen campaigns as far north as the Red River, east to the Mississippi, west as far as California.
Unlike many of the other old land grant families, they’d welcomed the new immigrants from the United States, finding them to be hardy, frugal, and possessed of the fighting spirit the Gutierrezes so admired. The other families were largely absentee landlords, living in style in Mexico City or back in Spain, and had little feeling for how things were here on the frontier. These new people could be valuable allies, or enemies as fierce as the Comanche and Kiowa raiders. It just depended upon how you treated them.
And when more and more of them came, and the government in Mexico City decided they were undesirable, the Gutierrezes had fatefully decided to cast their lot with the Texicans. A Gutierrez had died at the Alamo, two others fought on Sam Houston’s side at San Jacinto.
A grateful Republic of Texas had not only confirmed their claim to the land grants, but had offered them thousands more acres on the proviso that the Gutierrezes did all they could to develop the all-too-desolate countryside.
Over the years since the family had proved as adept at business as they were at war. Three-quarters of the people in the counties surrounding the Gutierrez ranch owed their jobs to one or another of the enterprises the family had started.
Not that it had always been easy. The land itself seemed sometimes more of an enemy than a whole army full of soldiers might have been. Rainfall in West Texas is, to put it mildly, inconsistent. Months would go by without a drop and even the hardy buffalo grass would wilt and die. Then the clouds would roil and spin, the heavy drops for which they’d waited so long would begin to fall. And wouldn’t stop until the rivers overran their banks, cattle lowed pitifully on the little islands upon which they’d been stranded. The whirling tubes of the tornados would rake the land like the fingernails of the gods.
Still they hung on, stubbornly resisting selling off even small pieces of the land they’d won at such cost. Sons left to join the military, some never coming back. The ones who did married into the local populace, so much so that there were more blond-haired, blue-eyed Gutierrezes than there were those who harkened back to their Castilian heritage.
It had paid off when the wildcatters came. The Gutierrez ranch was found to be sitting atop one of the biggest pools of oil in West Texas.
The sudden wealth changed things not a great deal at the Gutierrez ranch. Pickup trucks were still the vehicles of choice. Old Antonio Gutierrez, Sam’s father, was still to be found perusing the racks at the local hardware store, his worn jeans and boots that sadly needed resoling looking just like those worn by everyone else.
The one thing they did do, and for this Clyde Macallan was eternally grateful, was support their local politician, as long as that politician reflected the values and desires of the constituents of West Texas. Antonio Gutierrez had financed his first campaign, and had been a reliable donor ever since.
What he’d just done for Sam Gutierrez would in no way pay the debt Clyde Macallan owed the family. But the family didn’t deal in debts and payoffs.
They just expected you to do the right thing.
He was pretty sure he had.
Chapter 22
Mark Petrillo passed the just-received message to Bentley Sloane. Sloane glan
ced at the flash priority stamp. Operational immediate. Drop everything else you’re doing and pay attention to this. Very few messages were flash priority. When they came through, you paid attention.
He read it quickly, glanced back at Petrillo. The latter’s face was set in grave lines.
“This sure as hell changes things,” he said.
Petrillo nodded. “Guess the POWs ain’t high priority anymore,” he said. “Big surprise.”
Sloane stifled the reply that threatened to escape his lips, the one that said, “They never were.” That part would have to remain secret.
Besides, why antagonize Petrillo? Over the last weeks they’d come to an accommodation—Sloane wouldn’t question the tactical decisions the FOB commander made, and Petrillo in turn would keep him fully informed, including explaining the reasons for this or that.
Besides, he’d gotten a letter from his father, a letter in response to his asking questions about just who Mark Petrillo was, that he seemed to have so many connections. Important connections.
Don’t cross him, the answer had come back. The Petrillos are old money. Lots of old money. And old money buys power, political and otherwise.
Sloane’s career objectives didn’t include antagonizing someone who could bring such power to bear.
“So you’re going to pass it on to Carmichael?” he said.
“You see any wiggle room in what they’re saying?”
“None at all,” Sloane replied. The message was quite succinct, and very specific.
Poor bastards, he thought. This is going to get them all killed.
Jim Carmichael had much the same reaction when he read the decoded message handed to him by Sergeant Dickerson.
Goddamn stupid, he thought. Sarpa, with his help, had carved out a nice little enclave where the NVA intruded only at their peril. For the last few days there had been no contact at all. The ’Yards and their H’Mong allies moved freely about the area, now not even worrying about the helicopter gunships that still overflew, albeit at altitudes that kept them safely above small-arms range.
And for just a little while Carmichael had allowed himself a little hope. That the area wasn’t important enough to the Vietnamese to risk the casualties they’d take in winning it back. That he’d be able to finish his mission, get the former POWs out, though Korhonen was still saying he wasn’t going anywhere. He had a plan even for that. One of the resupply drops had brought, among other medical supplies, a bottle of chloral hydrate. He or one of the sergeants would slip the knockout drops into Korhonen’s food, bundle his unconscious ass up, and have him on the end of the string of a Fulton Recovery Rig before he woke up.
Now this.
Stupid.
Sarpa won’t go for it anyway, he told himself. For a lot of reasons. Why should he sacrifice his people for us, again? We sure as hell haven’t done right by them so far. We abandoned them in Vietnam, we won’t even let the ones who made it into the refugee camps in Thailand come to the United States, and now they’re being requested to bail us out again?
We do it, and there won’t be such a thing as a Montagnard enclave. The NVA would never allow it. They’ll come in here and kill every living thing.
Goddamn stupid.
“Sarpa in the camp?” he asked Dickerson.
Dick nodded. His brow was knotted in worry. “Saw him just a few minutes ago,” he said. “Told him you might want to talk to him, once you got this message.”
Carmichael sighed. Orders were orders. Even if they were stupid.
To Jim’s complete surprise, Y Buon Sarpa not only accepted the mission sent down from the Pentagon, but seemed happy with it.
“I knew they would need allies in this region again,” he said.
Jim wanted to say, but didn’t, that yes, they’d want allies for this. And then they’d abandon them just as quickly once the mission was accomplished. If it could be accomplished at all.
He contented himself with protesting that they really didn’t have sufficient assets. A couple of thousand able-bodied Montagnard soldiers, hampered by at least four times that many dependents. The heaviest weapons they had were mortars. There would be no air support, no artillery. They’d be attacking seasoned combat veterans. Surprise would only go so far.
“But don’t you see, Jim, that the road must be stopped?” Sarpa replied. “If it is allowed to go through, there will be no place in this part of the world in which we can be safe. We will continually be fighting a rear-guard action, surviving only because they don’t want to take the trouble to wipe us out. They must be stopped.”
“I agree,” Korhonen chimed in. “We allow them to do this, there will not be a base in Southeast Asia from which we can roll them back. They will be in full control.”
We’re never going to roll them back, Jim wanted to say. They’ve got Laos, Cambodia as soon as the Khmer Rouge finish consolidating, and they’re going to have them from now on. Or at least as long as it takes for their system of government to fall of its own weight. There is going to be no D-Day, no Normandy, no allied army rolling them back.
His last hope that Sarpa would come to his senses was dashed when the Montagnard commander summoned his subordinates and started laying out plans.
“At least, let’s get the dependents out of here,” he said. “Send ’em south with an escort of soldiers. Right now the border between Laos and Cambodia is a no-man’s-land. They can hide in the caves down there, be safer than anywhere around here.”
Sarpa thought for a minute, looked at Korhonen, who nodded. “Good idea,” he said. “It will free up some of the troops who now have to guard the villages. And we will need all the troops we can get.”
Damned if you won’t, Jim thought.
“You will help us, Jim?” Sarpa said.
Carmichael shrugged. “Might as well,” he said. “Don’t have anything better to do.”
The first attack on a road-building crew took place two days later. The Montagnards had moved into position the night before, surprised to find that the Vietnamese had placed no outposts, had no patrols in the area. At first light they were ready. The attack was kicked off by a round from a 57mm recoilless rifle slamming into the engine of a Russian bulldozer. By the time the sleepy road crew got out of their hammocks and tried to return fire they were overwhelmed by the assault parties that swept through the construction site, leaving only death and destruction behind. Forty-two Vietnamese were killed in the assault, another half-dozen were tracked down and shot as they tried to escape into the jungle, and two were taken prisoner.
Besides the bulldozer, which was burning merrily, they destroyed three trucks, a road grader, and a communications van. In a bunker they found several hundred pounds of industrial dynamite—made in France, Jim couldn’t help noticing—which they carried away for future use.
It was a small attack, but significant. It was followed by two others, equally successful. Road-building equipment that could be replaced only weeks, or perhaps months, later was being destroyed. The road-building crews were getting spooked. And after the Montagnards captured or killed three survey parties no surveys got done.
Road building stopped. The surviving crews pulled back to Tchepone.
It wouldn’t last, Jim told himself.
He was right.
The attack came just after dawn, when the mist that perpetually shrouded the mountains was at its heaviest. Jim heard the whop of the helicopter blades just as one of the Montagnard sentries started banging on the suspended artillery shell that served as an alarm bell. He had time only to grab for the bag strapped to his leg before the olive-green form of the bird appeared over the southern edge of the camp.
All over the camp the others were doing the same thing. One of the first items Jim had requested be included in the resupply drops were sufficient M-17 gas masks for everyone in the camp. He and the NCOs had trained all the soldiers in their use, conducting drill after drill in which every soldier stopped whatever he was doing, ripped the mask from the ba
g strapped to his right leg, pulled it over his face, slapped a palm over the exhaust valve and blew any contaminated air out of the mask, then finally tightened all the straps. Sarpa had levied heavy fines on anyone caught without the mask, to the extent that all the soldiers carried them wherever they went, even if it was to the latrine, and had them close to hand when they crawled into their hammocks at night.
He was just clearing his own mask when the yellow mist started drifting down. He’d also insisted that the soldiers wear sleeves rolled down, as his own were now. The stuff acted as a blister agent on exposed flesh—too much of it and you’d show the same symptoms as someone with third-degree burns. The little places still exposed after putting the hat back on after masking—the hands and maybe a little flesh on the neck—would be painful but not incapacitating.
He could only hope that the men still in the bunkers had heard the alarm. The yellow rain would settle in the low places, contaminating them for days if not weeks. An unmasked individual had no chance at all in one of the bunkers.
The ’Yards out in the open, he was glad to see, were fully masked and even now running toward gun emplacements. Within seconds a stream of tracers was reaching from one of the machine-gun pits toward the chopper. The pilot banked sharply, disappeared behind a stand of trees. Good pilot, Jim thought. Probably trained him ourselves.
Suspecting that this would simply be a softening-up exercise, Jim ran to the bunker where he kept the SAM-7 handheld antiaircraft missiles, finding one of the Montagnard sergeants already there and handing out the deadly tubes. He grabbed one, ran to an open area where he could get a clear shot for long enough for the heat seeker on the nose of the missile to acquire the target.
Sure enough, he heard the whop of blades again, this time multiples. The heavily laden gunships, called Hogs by crews and ground troops alike during the Vietnam War, came in from the east, the first releasing a volley of rockets that impacted close to the machine-gun bunker that had fired at the chemical bird.
Bayonet Skies Page 27